I got lucky and saw Fraenkel Gallery’s Instagram post about the PBS American Masters documentary on Garry Winogrand which aired last Thursday night.
Winogrand is my favorite photographer, I saw his 1988 retrospective at MoMA curated by Szarkowski, I saw SFMoMA’s 2015 retrospective, I saw the exhibition at Pier 24 gallery where they displayed prints of every image from his Women are Beautiful book on one massive wall, and I even attended Geoff Dyers's lecture last year at Getty for the release of his book on Winogrand.
I have seen several videos of interviews of Winogrand, have numerous books on his work, but I always want to learn more about him and his process. This PBS documentary is amazing. It has old interviews of Gary, lecture audio from Szarkowski speaking about Winogrand’s work, video shot by Winogrand, interviews of scholars, as well as interviews of his family and friends. Great insight in to the man. If you like Winogrand’s work, documentary photography, or just great images, you will enjoy this film.
Also, as a documentary photographer who photographs on the street, I particularly loved these following three quotes from the film about Street Photography :
“If we applied standard definitions of propriety and niceness to photographers working in the street we’d be left without a lot of the great pictures in the history of photography.”
Jeffrey Fraenkel – Gallerist
“I find it kind of intriguing because we allow the State to photograph us so relentlessly and yet people don’t seem as bothered by that as they do by someone who is clearly an artist.”
Michael Ernest Sweet – Photographer
“It’s an artistic process, you live within this process. So the questions of surveillance, political correctness, all of that stuff, it’s just totally irrelevant. Now perhaps that makes the few of us who even understand what I’m talking about right now are dinosaurs or insensitive ghouls or whatever…but who cares about that?”
Tod Papageorge – Photographer
